Are brits somehow so genetically different than indians that they require servants to survive heat? This sure seems to think that is a strong factor. Literally wtf.
Tldr; Brits enslaved locals to do their work so they could sweat less. Bravo. Who publishes this tactless drivel?
It's not "tactless drivel" to accurately state what actually happened. The British in colonial India were a highly privileged class, and they did a lot worse than just making their punkahwallahs sweat.
(Kipling also wrote SF short stories, set in a universe with the aforementioned organization as a world government, for example "As Easy As A.B.C." (1912).)
As someone in Pakistan, I can tell you that it is a term but doesn't necessarily need to have been documented. If someone does something as a trade, you append -waala to their trade and call them by that.
So, if you see someone driving a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw as they're known in Pakistan, you refer to the driver as a rickshaw-waala. A chai seller becomes a chai-waala, a fruit seller becomes a fruit-waala, and so on.
Well, it seems likely they were less-well adapted to local diseases than the locals. But I'd guess that childhood exposure may be enough to explain this, plus cultural adaptation? They certainly died in large numbers, in early days; IIRC, only 10% of Company employees made it alive to retirement back home. (I presume, but don't know, that more upper-class Mughals survived to equivalent age.)
Also, as TFA mentions in passing, many of these were the same strategies as practiced by upper-class locals: "adopted punkhas from the Mughals", swung by servants of course, wore light clothes, adopted a schedule designed around heat, not around far-northern winter daylight hours.
It does make me wonder if people from equatorial regions might have a different circadian rhythm than people from the extreme north. Might this dovetail with the (perplexingly simultaneous) perception of daytime "laziness" and an overactive nightlife of the global south?
> Tldr; Brits enslaved locals to do their work so they could sweat less
Actually, some Brits such as Churchill wanted to do to India exactly the same as was done to Australia, New Zealand, the Americas or "at least" get to a condition like was done in Apartheid South Africa. There was active efforts to exterminate and genocide the indigenous population in India: large engineered famines. It is just by sheer numbers and thanks to Germany wanting to get in on the colonial trophies triggering a war that India and other South East Asian nations managed to survive. If not for those great wars, and if guys like Churchill had continued their policies it would not be inconceivable that India could have been genocided out and the population replaced with "good European stock" as Churchill would have said.
Citation needed. The British certainly viewed Indians as expendable, and many decisions during (say) the Bengal Famine made squarely favored military wartime supply at the expense of the local population, but I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that the British intentionally created the famine.
The first modern genocide (if you don't count the Congolese, which most don't but should) was a death march. The Turks didn't try to eliminate the Armenians by shooting or poisoning or slashing them; they simply made them walk, en masse and in horrible conditions, until they died.
If you've supplanted an ethnic group's government and redirected resources such that people start dying in horrifically large numbers, that is also a case in which you're committing genocide. Even if you're the Brits.
First, I would say that the British should not receive the benefit of the doubt as to their behavior during the Bengal famine, given their intransigence to release grain during the Irish potato famine (and that so many Irish were forced to rely on potatoes leaving them vulnerable was another effect of British rule.)
I'm surprised that people are unwilling to see the facts of the case. For example, take this quotation: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph." or another one like: "I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China. I would rather have them develop in that way down south into India. Russia has a justifiable ambition to possess a warm water port. It is really embarrassing to think that 100,000,000 people are without one." . If you were to imply that the quotes were from Hitler, then everyone is happy to say yes, that's evidence of a desire and planning for genocide. But when they realize those quotes are directly from Churchill, all of sudden, there's so much waxing and waning and trying to protect his "legacy". The reality is those are the facts. Those are his quotes. Those are his clearly stated intentions. And the subsequent historical events of the famines are not mere accidents. Again, no one is alleging that "all the British intentionally created the famine", but to try to claim it was all an accident of nature and there was no desire for genocide at many levels of the British bureaucrats led by Churchill is patently a whitewash.
Citation of a blog not even mentioning what you describe doesn't count as a fact. War is harsh, colonization was a crime against humanity IMHO, but the ain't no proof about planned genocide of Indian population. Rather the locals were 'deprioritized' when supplies were considered during war, with horrible consequences.
"The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, provided scientific backing for arguments that Churchill's policies played a significant role in contributing to the 1943 catastrophe."
What’s the deal recently with new accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories? There’s a kernel of truth here but the conclusions and narrative are simplistic and false.
There’s no shortage of good historical resources on the Bengal famine which demanded at its peak 3x as much food as was sailing past to war-torn Europe, and with which Churchill asked FDR for assistance, but instead we just get inflammatory rhetoric.
Some of the information you're expressing is important, but it breaks the HN guidelines to push truth in the flamewar style, as you're doing here. Facts don't speak for themselves; there are infinitely many facts, it's up to a human to select them, and the human voice shows up nowhere more loudly than in the facts one selects.
If you're going to post about a divisive topic that's prone to flamewar like this one, you need to do so in the spirit of the site no matter how many facts or how much truth you possess. Otherwise you just damage the container here, and increase the amount of alienation between people, which harms HN and doesn't help the world much either. The cause of the truth is only served to the extent that people can hear you. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?
I've written about this kind of thing before, if more explanation or context would be helpful:
Invoking Hitler specifically when speaking about the history of genocide by European powers doesn't seem particularly inappropriate.
I'm trying to understand the emotionally-charged responses to macewindu's comments, as they're not particularly inflammatory vis a vis the history being discussed; white fragility[1] comes to mind. It's important to understand when one's responses might be influenced by the defensiveness they feel towards a perceived attack on their values. macewindu hasn't been wrong, but he has drawn attention to events that people who feel pride in the progressiveness of Western civilization would feel deeply shameful of, and it's understandable but unacceptable for that to draw out juvenile declamations like calling these facts of history, "anti-Western conspiracy theories." Be better than that.
> It is a sad day when providing facts is described as "anti-western".
> We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.
These are the sorts of things people post when they've left the path of curious conversation and are just lashing back against what someone else said.
Also, you Godwinized the thread (invariably a flamewar marker) by taking some horrific quotes from Churchill and escalating that into full Hitlerhood. Again, that's not the path of curious conversation—that's fighting a demon. You can't do both at the same time; none of us can.
If you post in this way, you end up producing the opposite of what you presumably want. Instead of getting people to expand their view of Churchill to include more of his shadow, you push them into locking their current picture down even more, because that is how people react to battle moves. All you'll get in that case is equally inflamed reactive posts back. No one's mind will be changed, only intensified. That is the flamewar style.
Also, you've created accounts to do this sort of flamewar on HN before, and we've asked you not to before, and now you've done it again. That's a seriously bad pattern. Please don't do that. I understand that you have good reason to feel the way you do, and that it's based on valid information that ought not to be so quickly rejected by Western readers. But coming at them with a flaming sword only recreates the problem—and meanwhile it contributes to destroying HN, which helps no one.
HN is a highly international community. We're nowhere close to global consensus on such topics.
If you think some other post is way off base, it's best to assume good faith as the guidelines ask and reply patiently with correct information, not name-calling like "anti-western conspiracy theories". If you do the latter, there's a good chance you'll make the situation worse by increasing the distance between us instead of bridging it.
I'm no expert on Indian history, but that seems implausible. Famines would only serve to increase unrest and undermine the stability of British rule. The famines seem to be more a result of neglect and mismanagement than active efforts.
Furthermore, India in the 1800s-1900s was not exactly like the Americas, Australia or South Africa. The population was much larger, and social, economic or cultural structures were much more robust, long-standing and harder to dismantle.
The history of revolutions and riots in France, Russia, Ireland, and others [1] show the opposite: Often, people will tolerate inequality and injustice if they're fed and comfortable, but when people get hungry they get angry.
Famines were mainly a result of British mismanagement of resources. This mismanagement peaked when World War 2 was the top priority (read: Bengal famine). The British were indeed sloppy when it came to the welfare of Indians and did enact some evil policies. They were imperialists after all. But there's no evidence that the British wanted to "wipe out" the native population.
> there's no evidence that the British wanted to "wipe out" the native population.
No one accused all "the British". If you read my sentence, I used the word, some Brits such as Churchill. There's ample evidence of Churchill's desire to genocide, and even actions taken to genocide non-white people and subsequent whitewashing of the matters. I am sorry if some readers are upset to discover this about their hero, as I do realize a lot of Anglo-Saxon people worship Churchill, but these are unfortunately the facts of the matter.
"I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas," he wrote in a memo during his role as minister for war and air in 1919.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he continued.
"In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.""
You can also google Hanslope Park papers to see that a lot of other evidence of intentional planning for genocides and other serious crimes against humanity level of wrong doings were erased or blocked from being released. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-off...
I'd strongly object to saying these views are "unfortunately the facts of the matter" and that Churchill 'desired' genocide.
The Hanslope Park papers were about papers sent back to England related to the entire era of colonialism, not about "Churchill planning genocides" as you suggest.
Evidence like ""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," is nnot conclusive to you? I worry if you're not willing to call that evidence of "desired genocide" then you'll likely acquit Hitler and other genocidal maniacs.
There were parts of the world earmarked for white settlement, like the Kenyan highlands, and of course Australia & the Canadian prairie. But I've never heard of India making this list, everyone thought it was too hot.
To the extent that there was any plan for most of India, it seems to have been along the lines of taxing the peasants (hence salt) and using them as soldiers. Which of course was the traditional aim of empires, this was precisely the Mughal aim, but was quite a few generations past its prime in the 1940s. But if this is your game plan, then killing off the people is not in your interest. (I say "most" because obviously the plan for Bombay etc. was much like that for Hong Kong & Singapore, offshore trading posts, certainly a post-Mughal way to make a living.)
Of course if you had quoted the full context of your supposedly damning gas quote:
"It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."
lachrymatory gas: That's tear gas. To cause a great inconvenience yet leave no serious permanent effects. To reduce loss of life to a minimum. That's clearly not a memo calling for genocide.
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Why so much concern of British officers in India,
Better question would be how did common Indian population survived British Raj, when American Native populations did not.
Native Americans had no exposure or resistance to smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, etc etc. There are a lot of accounts of cities and towns being completely depopulated very rapidly during the early colonial period just from disease before there was large scale immigration to the Americas from the old world.
Follow-up question: why did the disease exchange only affect native Americans. Why didn't the colonists perish due to contact with deadly American diseases they had no exposure or resistance to? Why were the European diseases so deadly to Americans, but not vice versa?
This was less likely for two reasons. First, the old world had dense concentrations of people for much longer, which domesticated many different diseases, making them childhood annoyances. And second, we spent much longer living in Africa, and co-evolved with diseases like malaria, which but left these behind when emigrating via Alaska. (Edit: I forgot syphilis, which is a likely candidate for a new-world disease. But certainly there were fewer.)
East-west contact within Eurasia of course did bring some serious diseases to the West, to which people had no resistance. Plague in the 14thC, cholera in the 19th. (Did any similar diseases arrive in the East? I can't think of any.)
> But contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t all one sided. It’s believed that one Native American disease did slip on to the European ships and sailed onward to Europe doing some major damage in the process. That disease was syphilis.
There are plural accounts, but there is only a single documented case historians have evidence for of the British at Fort Pitt deliberately using infected items from their infirmary.
My uneducated guess is that the Europeans lived in much larger communities (in Europe), which is a much better breeding ground for disease. This meant they were much more full of disease than the native Americans.
Another uneducated guess is that this is why your pet <insert species name here> doesn't often get sick - they have much less contact with other <insert species name here>s than you do with other humans, contributing to less and slower spread of disease.
Please could a pathologist jump in and enlighten me?
> My uneducated guess is that the Europeans lived in much larger communities (in Europe), which is a much better breeding ground for disease
Not a bad guess, but completely wrong. The cities of Mesoamerica or the Andes or the Mississippian culture of North America would have dwarfed most European cities, before they were ravaged by disease.
The best explanation I have seen is that almost all domesticable animals in the New World were exterminated early, and so there wasn't anywhere near the cross-species disease potential in the Americas. Old Worlders had domesticated horses, goats, sheep, pigs, cows, a wide array of fowl, camels, dogs, cats, etc, etc. In the Americas, there were turkeys, ducks, llamas & alpacas, and guinea pigs - and not all of those in any one place.
First, Europeans lived in appalling filth. The sanitary details are well documented elsewhere, the most telling point being that cities of Western Europe only gained population by migration, not internal growth, so bad were the epidemics. It was a millennium-long germ warfare lab.
Second, Europeans and Asians lived alongside livestock such as pigs and fowl, and also rats, all notorious breeders of diseases that humans can catch. The interplay of illnesses between humans and animals fed the epidemics.
There was enough trade to exchange disease between Europe and Asia. The most well known example would be the plague that devestated Europe originated in East Asia. So the Indian population survived because they were exposed to the same diseases as Europeans and had developed some level of immunity.
Good point. Alexander the Great made it all the way to India before being defeated. Going the other way, Genghis Khan made it from Central Asia to Eastern Europe.
The population was too high and the institutions were robust. The institutions were also loosely identical to the other entities of the old world, and therefor designed to survive imperial institutions of similar kind.
This is similar to the British occupying any other large population center / former power in the old world. They won't probably be able to wipe the whole culture out.
Fundamentally because they're on the same contiental plate, and had exposure to the same germs, having been infected by the same or similar animals.
The decimation of the Americas was largely due to the fact that the ships that arrived brought with them germs to which the natives had no defences at all.
This topic is covered extensively in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
It's also what was used for much of the colonial period in India because of the British, so it's not exactly off-base. Fahrenheit is still often used among older populations in many ex-British colonies.
Plenty of melanin, and habits that didn't involve being out in the direct sun at its hottest probably helped.
As for the British officers of the time, I assume a key factor was having people (slaves and/or other subordinates) to order to do work while they stayed out of the direct sun as much as possible, in their relatively luxuriant accommodations.
It doesn't. Fairer skin would reflect more radiation, than darker skin, but it gets burned in the process.
I don't think skin color has much of an impact when withstand heat, as sweat is a much stronger temperature regulator. If it's humid heat, it becomes a matter of circulatory efficiency, body mass and plain endurance, as sweat can't evaporate and actually makes it worse.
How did those servants live in the scorching heat then?
But yeah, the article says as much:
> Finally, the British had servants. Even common British soldiers had servants. Most of the work the British did in India was mental - writing and reading reports, making decisions, giving orders. They spent a lot of time sitting down in the shade. Nearly all of the physical work that supported British lives in India was done by Indians. Intense physical exertion, in fact, could be deadly; if a British regiment had to perform a forced march, for instance, there was a real likelihood that at least a few of the men would die.
It's a weird question. "How does one survive in the heat?" "Well, one just has servants to do all the work." Uh what?
Melanin really doesn't have anything to do with it. If it leads to a suggestion that it was somehow appropriate for the British rulers of India to have Indians do all the manual labor, because somehow Indians were "better" at it (while the British were "better" at ruling, naturally), well, of course not. The division of labor in British colonial India had nothing to do with biology, literally nothing.
I think an implied part of the question is how did the british do it despite having customs and building habits designed for a colder climate. E.g. british troops had stuff uniforms, and british building styles weren’t designed for india.
Hence was much of the answer focusses on “going native” with “mughal dress”, local building styles, etc.
So, how did they adapt the face of apparent resistance to abandoning all of their normal customs kept up elsewhere.
Humans are good at acclimating to different climates, it's one of our unique adaptations. The ability to perspire and regulate body temperature in extremes is somewhat unique to humans, as few mammals share this ability. Other mammals do perspire, but only primates and horses sweat as much as we do.
For every officer living the privileged life described in this article there were dozens of rank and file British troops, who certainly had no servants, or any of the other described comforts and luxuries. No mention of them?
Fair enough, but the article did mention how much worse the Indian troops under their command had it. So seems odd that they wouldn't mention the British troops as well.
A dead comment mentions even rank and file troops had servants. In previous centuries it was much more common for middle status people to have hired help.
What a euro centric oblivious type of pseudo academic indulgence. I guess what we need to take from that is that colonialists we’re really busy people, entrepreneurs doing really important things, so this is the kind of perspective into their legacy that we’re missing. You do tend to deal with the heat rather well when someone else is doing the hard work and producing the staff you’re stealing from them.
I wonder if there’s a follow-up article on how the nazis kept their uniforms so tidy considering how many ditches and mass graves they stood around.
I wonder why you sound so snarky regarding this article.
It's not that the author defended them or said anything positive about them (except maybe "I've been there and can relate"). Nothing I read here surprised me, really. And it's not that he didn't mention that the burden was basically shouldered by the people there.
A lot of folks from countries ravaged by the Britishers really detest the Raj. Its understandable. I myself am from India and i too get a twinge of anger whenever the Raj is mentioned in a non negative way. I guess 70 years aren't enough to forget all that the colonials did.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadTldr; Brits enslaved locals to do their work so they could sweat less. Bravo. Who publishes this tactless drivel?
Also the British got their foot hold as Indian princes hired British and French mercenaries and had not read Machiavelli
I remember hearing it for the first time watching reruns of It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
(Kipling also wrote SF short stories, set in a universe with the aforementioned organization as a world government, for example "As Easy As A.B.C." (1912).)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Board_of_Control
So, if you see someone driving a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw as they're known in Pakistan, you refer to the driver as a rickshaw-waala. A chai seller becomes a chai-waala, a fruit seller becomes a fruit-waala, and so on.
Well, it seems likely they were less-well adapted to local diseases than the locals. But I'd guess that childhood exposure may be enough to explain this, plus cultural adaptation? They certainly died in large numbers, in early days; IIRC, only 10% of Company employees made it alive to retirement back home. (I presume, but don't know, that more upper-class Mughals survived to equivalent age.)
Also, as TFA mentions in passing, many of these were the same strategies as practiced by upper-class locals: "adopted punkhas from the Mughals", swung by servants of course, wore light clothes, adopted a schedule designed around heat, not around far-northern winter daylight hours.
Actually, some Brits such as Churchill wanted to do to India exactly the same as was done to Australia, New Zealand, the Americas or "at least" get to a condition like was done in Apartheid South Africa. There was active efforts to exterminate and genocide the indigenous population in India: large engineered famines. It is just by sheer numbers and thanks to Germany wanting to get in on the colonial trophies triggering a war that India and other South East Asian nations managed to survive. If not for those great wars, and if guys like Churchill had continued their policies it would not be inconceivable that India could have been genocided out and the population replaced with "good European stock" as Churchill would have said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Historio...
If you've supplanted an ethnic group's government and redirected resources such that people start dying in horrifically large numbers, that is also a case in which you're committing genocide. Even if you're the Brits.
Here's some scientific evidence that the Bengal famine of 1943 was not linked to soil moisture levels, like the previous five: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/churchill-policies-bl...
Again, the long history of callousness of the British empire towards its colonies should lead one to be skeptical of the official intent at the time.
> I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that the British intentionally created the famine.
It has been. Mass intentional famine for the purpose of genocide. Even published by the BBC.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/1...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/churchill-policies-bl...
I'm surprised that people are unwilling to see the facts of the case. For example, take this quotation: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph." or another one like: "I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China. I would rather have them develop in that way down south into India. Russia has a justifiable ambition to possess a warm water port. It is really embarrassing to think that 100,000,000 people are without one." . If you were to imply that the quotes were from Hitler, then everyone is happy to say yes, that's evidence of a desire and planning for genocide. But when they realize those quotes are directly from Churchill, all of sudden, there's so much waxing and waning and trying to protect his "legacy". The reality is those are the facts. Those are his quotes. Those are his clearly stated intentions. And the subsequent historical events of the famines are not mere accidents. Again, no one is alleging that "all the British intentionally created the famine", but to try to claim it was all an accident of nature and there was no desire for genocide at many levels of the British bureaucrats led by Churchill is patently a whitewash.
"The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, provided scientific backing for arguments that Churchill's policies played a significant role in contributing to the 1943 catastrophe."
There’s no shortage of good historical resources on the Bengal famine which demanded at its peak 3x as much food as was sailing past to war-torn Europe, and with which Churchill asked FDR for assistance, but instead we just get inflammatory rhetoric.
That's a gross mischaracterization of what was posted.
It is a sad day when providing facts is described as "anti-western".
> we just get inflammatory rhetoric
We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.
If you're going to post about a divisive topic that's prone to flamewar like this one, you need to do so in the spirit of the site no matter how many facts or how much truth you possess. Otherwise you just damage the container here, and increase the amount of alienation between people, which harms HN and doesn't help the world much either. The cause of the truth is only served to the extent that people can hear you. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?
I've written about this kind of thing before, if more explanation or context would be helpful:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm surprised but I'm open to being corrected. Please help me identify which statement I made which is considered "flamewar style".
Also, your quotes are talking about China, not India, and don't seem to mention genocide?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Sigh, surely you realize that in this context, both Hitler and his equal, Churchill are relevant.
I'm trying to understand the emotionally-charged responses to macewindu's comments, as they're not particularly inflammatory vis a vis the history being discussed; white fragility[1] comes to mind. It's important to understand when one's responses might be influenced by the defensiveness they feel towards a perceived attack on their values. macewindu hasn't been wrong, but he has drawn attention to events that people who feel pride in the progressiveness of Western civilization would feel deeply shameful of, and it's understandable but unacceptable for that to draw out juvenile declamations like calling these facts of history, "anti-Western conspiracy theories." Be better than that.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege#White_fragil...
> We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.
These are the sorts of things people post when they've left the path of curious conversation and are just lashing back against what someone else said.
Also, you Godwinized the thread (invariably a flamewar marker) by taking some horrific quotes from Churchill and escalating that into full Hitlerhood. Again, that's not the path of curious conversation—that's fighting a demon. You can't do both at the same time; none of us can.
If you post in this way, you end up producing the opposite of what you presumably want. Instead of getting people to expand their view of Churchill to include more of his shadow, you push them into locking their current picture down even more, because that is how people react to battle moves. All you'll get in that case is equally inflamed reactive posts back. No one's mind will be changed, only intensified. That is the flamewar style.
Also, you've created accounts to do this sort of flamewar on HN before, and we've asked you not to before, and now you've done it again. That's a seriously bad pattern. Please don't do that. I understand that you have good reason to feel the way you do, and that it's based on valid information that ought not to be so quickly rejected by Western readers. But coming at them with a flaming sword only recreates the problem—and meanwhile it contributes to destroying HN, which helps no one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you think some other post is way off base, it's best to assume good faith as the guidelines ask and reply patiently with correct information, not name-calling like "anti-western conspiracy theories". If you do the latter, there's a good chance you'll make the situation worse by increasing the distance between us instead of bridging it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Furthermore, India in the 1800s-1900s was not exactly like the Americas, Australia or South Africa. The population was much larger, and social, economic or cultural structures were much more robust, long-standing and harder to dismantle.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_riots
No one accused all "the British". If you read my sentence, I used the word, some Brits such as Churchill. There's ample evidence of Churchill's desire to genocide, and even actions taken to genocide non-white people and subsequent whitewashing of the matters. I am sorry if some readers are upset to discover this about their hero, as I do realize a lot of Anglo-Saxon people worship Churchill, but these are unfortunately the facts of the matter.
"I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas," he wrote in a memo during his role as minister for war and air in 1919.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he continued.
"In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.""
You can also google Hanslope Park papers to see that a lot of other evidence of intentional planning for genocides and other serious crimes against humanity level of wrong doings were erased or blocked from being released. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-off...
The Hanslope Park papers were about papers sent back to England related to the entire era of colonialism, not about "Churchill planning genocides" as you suggest.
Evidence like ""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," is nnot conclusive to you? I worry if you're not willing to call that evidence of "desired genocide" then you'll likely acquit Hitler and other genocidal maniacs.
To the extent that there was any plan for most of India, it seems to have been along the lines of taxing the peasants (hence salt) and using them as soldiers. Which of course was the traditional aim of empires, this was precisely the Mughal aim, but was quite a few generations past its prime in the 1940s. But if this is your game plan, then killing off the people is not in your interest. (I say "most" because obviously the plan for Bombay etc. was much like that for Hong Kong & Singapore, offshore trading posts, certainly a post-Mughal way to make a living.)
"It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."
lachrymatory gas: That's tear gas. To cause a great inconvenience yet leave no serious permanent effects. To reduce loss of life to a minimum. That's clearly not a memo calling for genocide.
[1] https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/snow-pits-to-breathe...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/gin-and-tonic-kept-the-...
>>>
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAL9HG2p98g#t=5s
Infectious diseases often arise when humans live in large groups with their animals from which a lot of the diseases originate.
East-west contact within Eurasia of course did bring some serious diseases to the West, to which people had no resistance. Plague in the 14thC, cholera in the 19th. (Did any similar diseases arrive in the East? I can't think of any.)
Fun tidbit:
> But contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t all one sided. It’s believed that one Native American disease did slip on to the European ships and sailed onward to Europe doing some major damage in the process. That disease was syphilis.
Another uneducated guess is that this is why your pet <insert species name here> doesn't often get sick - they have much less contact with other <insert species name here>s than you do with other humans, contributing to less and slower spread of disease.
Please could a pathologist jump in and enlighten me?
Not a bad guess, but completely wrong. The cities of Mesoamerica or the Andes or the Mississippian culture of North America would have dwarfed most European cities, before they were ravaged by disease.
The best explanation I have seen is that almost all domesticable animals in the New World were exterminated early, and so there wasn't anywhere near the cross-species disease potential in the Americas. Old Worlders had domesticated horses, goats, sheep, pigs, cows, a wide array of fowl, camels, dogs, cats, etc, etc. In the Americas, there were turkeys, ducks, llamas & alpacas, and guinea pigs - and not all of those in any one place.
First, Europeans lived in appalling filth. The sanitary details are well documented elsewhere, the most telling point being that cities of Western Europe only gained population by migration, not internal growth, so bad were the epidemics. It was a millennium-long germ warfare lab.
Second, Europeans and Asians lived alongside livestock such as pigs and fowl, and also rats, all notorious breeders of diseases that humans can catch. The interplay of illnesses between humans and animals fed the epidemics.
https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
If you look at the long term history, there was widespread and massive instances of migrations too.
This is similar to the British occupying any other large population center / former power in the old world. They won't probably be able to wipe the whole culture out.
The decimation of the Americas was largely due to the fact that the ships that arrived brought with them germs to which the natives had no defences at all.
This topic is covered extensively in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
`Greed` got to them before `Envy`, driven by `Pride`
As for the British officers of the time, I assume a key factor was having people (slaves and/or other subordinates) to order to do work while they stayed out of the direct sun as much as possible, in their relatively luxuriant accommodations.
I don't think skin color has much of an impact when withstand heat, as sweat is a much stronger temperature regulator. If it's humid heat, it becomes a matter of circulatory efficiency, body mass and plain endurance, as sweat can't evaporate and actually makes it worse.
Source: grew up in tropical coastal region.
But yeah, the article says as much:
> Finally, the British had servants. Even common British soldiers had servants. Most of the work the British did in India was mental - writing and reading reports, making decisions, giving orders. They spent a lot of time sitting down in the shade. Nearly all of the physical work that supported British lives in India was done by Indians. Intense physical exertion, in fact, could be deadly; if a British regiment had to perform a forced march, for instance, there was a real likelihood that at least a few of the men would die.
It's a weird question. "How does one survive in the heat?" "Well, one just has servants to do all the work." Uh what?
Melanin really doesn't have anything to do with it. If it leads to a suggestion that it was somehow appropriate for the British rulers of India to have Indians do all the manual labor, because somehow Indians were "better" at it (while the British were "better" at ruling, naturally), well, of course not. The division of labor in British colonial India had nothing to do with biology, literally nothing.
Hence was much of the answer focusses on “going native” with “mughal dress”, local building styles, etc.
So, how did they adapt the face of apparent resistance to abandoning all of their normal customs kept up elsewhere.
That is how they spent their summers.
Finally, the British had servants. Even common British soldiers had servants.
So maybe read the article before commenting on what is or is not in it?
I wonder if there’s a follow-up article on how the nazis kept their uniforms so tidy considering how many ditches and mass graves they stood around.
It's not that the author defended them or said anything positive about them (except maybe "I've been there and can relate"). Nothing I read here surprised me, really. And it's not that he didn't mention that the burden was basically shouldered by the people there.